Deadly Dose

by Amanda Lamb

  Morgan had a picture in his head of a boy growing up in Indiana in a family reminiscent of the 1950s classic Ozzie & Harriet. Eric Miller was from a good, sturdy Midwestern family for whom a love of God, family, and country made up the bedrock of his upbringing. Morgan had never been to Indiana, and really knew very little about the Midwest, but it’s a picture that he continued to embellish upon the more he learned about Eric. Years later Morgan would look back with almost eerie clarity and realize in the end just how right he had been about Eric Miller’s background.

  Eric Miller was born in 1970, in Cambridge City, Indiana, to Doris and Verus Miller. It was a small town where everyone knew one other. He had two older sisters whom he equally adored, and who adored him—Pam and Leeann. Eric had attended Lincoln High School, where he was the class vice president, a standout on the tennis team, and a member of the National Honor Society. It was these snippets of information, Eric’s life résumé if you will, that gave Morgan a preliminary outline of the man he would soon come to know intimately.

  Miller had grown up an active member of St. Elizabeth Catholic Church. He was an altar boy. Friends said he was popular with the girls, but he made it clear he was saving his virginity for marriage.

  Eric’s future wife, Ann Rene Brier, the oldest of three girls, was born on March 27, 1970, to Dan and Nancy Brier. Her sister Danielle came along in March of 1972, and Sara was born in October of 1980. Like her future husband, Ann also grew up in an all-American small town. Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, was not much different from Cambridge City, Indiana. Also like Eric, Ann was popular and athletic. She played field hockey and ran on the track team. She was even pretty enough to be a runner-up prom queen and cheerleader. Like Eric, Ann appeared to come from a salt-of-the-earth family.

  Chris Morgan believed the end of Eric Miller’s life was foreshadowed the day he met his future wife in biology class at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. They were both ambitious scientists with a desire to further their careers. Ann Brier also found another link with her future spouse—they shared a rare blood type, Rh negative. Medical experts say unless both parents have this same, uncommon blood type, there can be complications during pregnancy.

  “I still marvel sometimes at the ability and guts Ann had to try and pull off some of the things she did,” says Morgan. To this day he still doesn’t know how or if this “compatibility factor” motivated Ann Miller, but he knew enough about her to realize that Ann rarely did anything without a clear and direct goal in mind.

  Morgan says that soon after meeting, the pair became a couple. Eric proposed to Ann on Valentine’s Day in 1992, and as planned, she accepted. That same year they both graduated from Purdue with honors and degrees in biology. Father John Luerman married Ann and Eric on February 27, 1993, in the Catholic church Eric had attended as a child. They then migrated to the Raleigh area to pursue doctoral degrees at North Carolina State University. Another lure— Ann’s parents were living in Raleigh, where her mother was a teacher’s assistant and her father worked for the John Deere Company.

  The couple bought their first house in the suburbs in a quaint bedroom community of Raleigh called Holly Springs, a town that was not unlike the modest, wholesome tree-lined communities where they had both grown up. They were living the American dream; at least that’s what it looked like to the outside world.

  Eric was described to Morgan by fellow students and teachers as a bright self-starter, devoted to his work, his wife, and his church. Ann, on the other hand, did not do as well in her doctoral program as Eric, and ultimately dropped out to take a job with Glaxo Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) , a large pharmaceutical company in the business sector of Raleigh called Research Triangle Park.

  The couple bought a new home in West Raleigh in September of 1997. Eric graduated with a doctorate in 1999 and started work as an AIDS researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. With his new job, the pair was ready to start a family, but despite their compatible blood types, their road to fertility was not smooth. After months of trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child, they eventually attempted in vitro fertilization.

  In an e-mail to Carl Mackewicz on January 21, 1999, Ann Miller shared her fertility struggles with him. “I have been through so many Dr.’s and nurses you couldn’t begin to imagine . . . I decided by giving up hope—I’d be taking the middle road—I wouldn’t be setting myself and my family up for disappointment constantly,” said Ann.

  She went on to describe how her feelings about her fertility struggles had caused her to be resentful of her family. Although she says she felt guilty about having these thoughts, “It’s difficult to even see my sister there holding her child—I feel envy, hurt and could even go as far to say disgust,” she wrote.

  Finally, the fertility treatments took. On January 17, 2000, Clare Elise Miller came into the world at Rex Hospital. Morgan cannot talk about this event in the Miller time line without reminding anyone who is listening that this is the same hospital where Clare’s father would die less than a year after his daughter’s birth. Clare’s well-being became a driving force for Morgan and the entire Miller family early on in the investigation into Eric’s murder. In fact, she was such a driving force, that Morgan’s desire to tell this story comes largely from his desire for Clare to know the truth.

  Morgan and many other investigators talked to Eric’s neighbors, coworkers, and friends. Everyone described Eric Miller as funny, full of life, a wonderful father. He loved children so much he even made special bags for the neighborhood kids on Halloween. He loved the outdoors and was especially at home in the garden. He was what Morgan referred to as a “meat-and-potatoes guy.” In the hundreds of interviews that were done, Morgan insists that not one person had a negative thing to say about Eric Miller. This simply doesn’t happen in murder investigations. Not one negative comment, snide remark, or qualified statement? If Eric had any skeletons in his closet, Morgan never found them; and Morgan was good at finding skeletons.

  The more Morgan learned, the more he was convinced that Ann Miller was putting on an act. She pretended to be the devoted wife and loving mother, but she was something else altogether. She was a woman he felt sure was capable of killing her husband even if he didn’t have the proof yet.

  SILVER BELLS

  Over the Christmas holidays that first year, less than a month after Eric’s death, Ann packed up nearly one-year-old baby Clare and headed to Indiana to spend time with Eric’s family. When Morgan heard about this he could not believe the gall of the woman. He was frightened by her amazing ability to appear so convincingly innocent to everyone around her. If she was truly responsible for her husband’s murder, this was a dangerous game of manipulation. By allowing herself to be cocooned in the center of the family that was so desperately grieving Eric’s loss, she was risking being found out. But Morgan would soon come to understand that risk taking was a large part of Ann Miller’s personality.

  In Morgan’s mind the holiday visit made it even less likely that the police would consider Ann a suspect in her husband’s death. It was part of a very simple and seemingly perfect plan. Clearly, one would imagine that a murderer wouldn’t dare spend time with the family of the man whom she had killed. It didn’t make sense. And because it didn’t make sense, this simple act helped cast her as the grieving widow in the eyes of the world instead of as a cold-blooded killer.

  FOR THE LOVE OF ERIC

  When Doris and Verus Miller came to Raleigh for their son’s funeral, they had no inkling that their daughter-in-law might be a suspect. They were operating under a cloud of grief and shock so thick that they could hardly see in front of them. In most murder cases Morgan noticed that grief had a way of sucking people into a dark place that they must claw their way out of. Sometimes this took years. Because of their all-consuming grief, it was impossible for them to see a potential killer in their inner circle, the mother of their grandchild, the woman who had promised to love and cherish their son.


  Morgan recalls first meeting the Millers in passing when they came to the police station in January of 2001. They were in town along with their daughters, Eric’s sisters, Pam and Leeann, to help celebrate baby Clare’s first birthday. It was clear to Morgan that maintaining a relationship with their granddaughter was akin to staying connected to their dead son. Captain Donald Overman was the officer tasked with speaking to the Millers during their brief visit. After the meeting he voiced his concerns to Morgan.

  “Overman came out of the meeting and said, ‘We’ve got to do something for these people. They don’t have a clue. They don’t have any idea what’s going on here,’ ” Morgan says.

  It was then that Morgan vowed that he would not let the Millers be manipulated by a woman who he believed with all his heart had something to do with their son’s death. But the timing had to be right; Morgan didn’t want to spook Ann too early by letting it slip that the police were onto her already. He knew that the Millers’ close relationship with Ann might benefit the investigation down the road. Years later he would revisit this notion and realize just how important this seemingly small detail had become to the big picture.

  MAGICAL THINKING

  Dr. Michael Teague, the forensic psychologist for the Raleigh Police Department, was often Morgan’s “partner in crime.” They batted about theories like friendly rivals on a tennis court firing balls at each other, though it was clear neither of them had been on an actual tennis court for a very long time, if ever. They didn’t always agree, but Morgan consistently sought Teague’s input, if for no other reason than to give him another angle to consider.

  Teague was convinced that Ann Miller was living in a delusional state of mind he labeled “magical thinking.” Basically Teague thought Ann felt herself to be so superior to everyone around her, especially police officers, that she completely denied any possibility that she risked being found out. The image that she had fashioned for the world—of a loving wife, doting mother, and esteemed scientist—was what she saw when she looked in the mirror, and she magically assumed that everyone else saw the same thing.

  By this time investigators had enough evidence to safely conclude that Ann Miller had had affairs with Carl Mackewicz and Derril Willard. Morgan thought for sure that when Ann suspected that the heat was on her, she would turn on one or both of these men and possibly blame them for Eric’s murder. At the very least, Morgan assumed Ann would come clean early on in the investigation in order to try to spin the affairs to her advantage in some way, to couch herself in the guise of a naive woman who’d been led astray. But she said nothing, and her lawyers said nothing.

  In January of 2001, Ann Miller retained a second high-powered attorney, Joseph Cheshire, who, like Ann’s other attorney, Wade Smith, later became well known for defending one of the Duke lacrosse players against allegations of rape. Again, like Smith, Cheshire was a formidable force in the world of defense attorneys. The fact that Ann had hired not one, but two heavy hitters was another huge red flag for Morgan. In North Carolina people who faced the death penalty were always given two court-appointed attorneys if they could not afford to pay for their own. Morgan wondered if Ann was planning ahead.

  Morgan kept going back to the transcript from the single time Ann had been interviewed by police. That night offered the only peek directly into Ann’s state of mind. At this point in the game it was all Morgan had to hang his big white fedora on.

  “While the detectives that interviewed her that night never did ask her point-blank, ‘Did you kill your husband?’ one thing they did ask her, and that was a good question, was, ‘Do you know of anybody who had anything against Eric?’ ” Morgan recalled from the transcript. Ann had answered in a roundabout way, saying that Eric had had a minor dispute with a neighbor over a privacy fence, but it was clear that this altercation wouldn’t have risen to the level of murder.

  Morgan always thought Ann had missed a perfect opportunity that night to point the finger at Willard and set the stage early on for him to take the fall. But she didn’t. To Morgan, Ann Miller was not nearly as smart as the woman she saw looking back at her in the mirror.

  MEDICAL MYSTERY

  Morgan recalls that about this time medical records were starting to pour in. What they showed was that Eric Miller had made a remarkable recovery after being released from UNC Hospitals on November 24, before he was readmitted to Rex Hospital on December 1, where he ultimately died. All of the reports showed that during this period of time Eric Miller’s health was on the upswing. Doctors told investigators that most people exposed to high doses of arsenic either die immediately or recover fully.

  “Eric’s case didn’t fit the pattern. He got exposed to arsenic, he improved, and then all of a sudden he became terribly, terribly ill again at a time that coincided with him essentially being alone with Ann,” Morgan said.

  Investigators learned that on November 30, the night before his final hospitalization at Rex, Eric was alone with Ann at their home. Verus and Doris, who had been in town since Eric’s first hospitalization, had gone out to dinner alone for the first time in a week. Ann had warmed up a chicken-and-rice dish that someone from their church had bought over for her and Eric. A little more than twenty-four hours after his last meal with Ann, Eric Miller was dead.

  By this time investigators had also noted that Derril Willard was very much out of the running as someone who could have administered the last, deadly dose of arsenic to Eric. He had had no contact with Eric Miller since that night at the bowling alley some two weeks prior. The only person who had close contact with Eric Miller the night before his downward spiral into eventual death was his wife.

  “The whole situation started to very much fall under ‘the truth makes sense,’ ” says Morgan. “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not true. It had a smell about it. It had a slight smell that first night. As time went on, the smell got even more and more pronounced.”

  THREE

  He who truly knows has no need to shout.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI

  “I searched your house and in the trash can I found a note that you wrote,” Detective Debbie Regentin stated to Ann in that first and only interview with her. “Do you know when it was written?”

  “No, I don’t remember. Eric always kept them. I would tear them up,” Ann said matter-of-factly.

  “In another note I found you had written that Eric was wanting you to give up a friend. I know you guys are professional people. Do you remember the note?” the detective countered Ann’s dismissal of the issue.

  “Eric was overly jealous,” Ann said of her dead husband. “Ninety percent of the people I work with are men.”

  “Like my work,” Detective Regentin responded without judgment.

  “He has a hard time with that. I have a very good friend at work. I have a lot of friends at work. I think the friend was a guy in California. I worked on a project with him. He showed me around while I was there. Eric asked me not to spend so much time with him,” Ann said with a hint of annoyance in her voice.

  “You were just friends?” the detective asked.

  Ann Miller never answered the question. But investigators would soon learn the answer. The letter was about Carl Mackewicz, and based on what they learned, he was much more than just a friend to Ann Miller.

  IT TAKES TWO

  Early on in the investigation, Chris Morgan felt that detectives should focus on whether or not Ann had had help killing Eric, even if her accomplice may not have been part of the final act. Clearly, she had questionable relationships with multiple men. Carl Mackewicz or Derril Willard might have been in on her plan. But even if neither of them physically helped her, it’s unlikely that she kept her evil deeds entirely to herself. In Morgan’s experience, killers often felt the need to tell someone what they had done. The catharsis of telling even just one person was often the key to solving the case. In Morgan’s mind that one person might just be Derril Willard.

  As investigators looked at the event
s surrounding the night at the bowling alley on November 15, 2000, the night Eric became violently ill and was first hospitalized, it became clear that he must have received a dose of arsenic in his beer. Eric had told the men he was with that the beer tasted funny and almost immediately afterward started having violent stomach pains. Ann Miller, the good wife, the concerned wife, took her husband to Rex Hospital early in the morning on November 16.

  “Within two hours of arriving at the bowling alley, he was throwing up in a bag, in a garbage can, while he was still trying to bowl,” says Morgan. “Within two hours of drinking that beer, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning started to fully manifest themselves in Eric Miller.”

  THE GOOD WIFE

  “He started throwing up about eleven,” a tearful Ann told the detective. “And then he was throwing up until the wee hours, and he always, it makes him mad when I say this, but Eric always gets sick worse than Clare and I. He always gets it harder,” Ann said, sobbing.

  “He got up every hour on the hour at three like he had thought maybe he should go to the hospital but he didn’t want to wake Clare, so at six he said I’m not going to be okay. I got dressed and I got Clare and we went to the emergency room that morning.”

  The detective went on to ask Ann Miller whether or not her husband ate or drank anything at the house before going to the hospital. She told him that she gave Eric a Coke.

  “They admitted him. They said he had that stomach flu,” Ann told the detective. “Two or three nurses had gone home from it. And it comes from something you eat and then he got very distended and he said help me because he wanted, he wanted to be helped. He went back in X-ray. He had fluids around his heart and then they left him in the ER. They told him he was going to get a room for his stomach flu. He was in the ER for thirty hours. I came back. I’m getting mad at the ER because he is still there. He said, ‘You go home,’ ” Ann said, pausing for a moment. “He said, ‘You go home and get some rest,’ and I came back the next morning and he was still there,” she said, sobbing again. “He was still looking pale in the ER and he couldn’t sleep and nobody called me because he was all alone and all that noise. The doctor came in and she got really mad. She said the nurses are terrible, and the doctor got really mad he was still there.”